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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   28172 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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This was half-written almost 4 weeks ago but I lost interest; might be as good an opportunity to post as ever will be.

Israeli elections and the limits of excuses

Can Israel get so right-wing that it'll lose its title of «the only democracy in the Middle East» and turn into just another icky Middle Eastern ally of convenience, like Saudi Arabia? Can it be disavowed, at a minimum, by the democratic consensus of the US – not wokes and token bugbears like Omar, but the Pelosi party core?

The Israeli are committed to find the answer. In the recent elections, one Itamar Ben Gvir, came third and is poised to become Minister of National Security. Conservative Jews of the US are worried:

“This very eternal pride causes us to firmly turn to the next prime minister of Israel with a request not to appoint Itamar Ben Gvir to a ministerial position in the new government. He has been convicted of criminal acts including incitement of racism, possession of propaganda material of a terrorist organization and support of a terrorist organization.”

Blumenthal said his organization, through Mercaz Olami, felt compelled to act as it believes that the inclusion of far-right politicians in general, and Ben Gvir specifically, poses a serious threat to the Israel-Diaspora relationship.

“The relationship between America and Israel… is founded on shared values, including a commitment to democracy and human rights and the fight against racism and antisemitism. To have a person in the government who has made racist statements and supported violence in the past is very concerning,” Blumenthal said.

Gvir is a Kahanist, a terrorist supporter (convicted in an Israeli court, ah, but I hear now it's partisan lefties), perhaps tied to the assassination of Rabin, and an unashamed Jewish supremacist, with a... non-expansive idea of who counts as a Jew to boot.

To be clear: I think that Israel is a true democracy, more of a democracy than, say, the US (by virtue of a clear binding ideology and having a multi-party system) – albeit an increasingly illiberal one. But that's not all of what Westerners mean when they use that word.

Maxim Katz, an Israeli-raised Russian liberal opposition leader (Russian mother, if that matters) who has gone back recently on the account of the war, notes curious parallels between his two homelands:

Knowledge of Hebrew allows one to observe Israeli politics with curiosity. There has been a long struggle between two equal parts of society, those who are against Netanyahu and those who are against. And those who won by a very small margin got the majority.

And suddenly it turned out that when a government is based on far-right people with little in common, it is not very sensible! Now everyone's shocked: some newly-influential person has proposed strengthening national sovereignty and is enacting, verbatim, the agenda of our deputy Fedorov [a conspiracy theorist from Duma who says Russian Constitution was scripted by Americans and has to be amended to grant more authority to the Cz… President Putin – btw, as it already was, in 2020].

With local specifics, of course. He proposes to fight foreign interference in Israeli politics, to identify foreign agents of influence :)) , to impose all sorts of sanctions on them. And at the same time, in his opinion, it is necessary that women give birth to more children.

To fulfill these glorious goals, this person has received a whole department in the office of the Prime Minister; will be able to appoint representatives to all ministries such that they'll identify agents of foreign governments :)) and promote traditional values.

It's funny here!

The commentariat is split between stressing that he can't know nothin' without decades of experience on the ground and how wretched it is to use filthy Russian analogies for understanding the best country in the world – and grimly agreeing. You can find the same discourse on Reddit (1, 2, 3) and elsewhere. A suspicion creeps in that Max will soon learn how this isn't really funny. I don't like him, but immensely appreciate the unexpected consistency of his liberal inclinations. You get this with Jews (expansively defined) sometimes, as with other people.

Not always, to be sure.

This post was inspired by my getting blocked here by JarJarJedi (you get a notification for it btw) after making the case for considering Israel a potential global threat and source of X-risk (you be the judge of its merit). Here's his rationale I didn't respond to in time: 1, 2.

It was an amusing and edifying moment. I don't remember altercating with JJJ in my years here, and in fact I thought favorably of him. Uh, have you read HunterXHunter? When I saw those, I was reminded of Ch. 298 (manga novices: go right to left). A specific frame - you'll know it when you see it. The hair-trigger activation of the tribal Us vs. Them framework, blatant lies, underdog posture that'd put any woke establishment journalist to shame, cackling and hollering about Da Joos, blatant misrepresentation and shell games with definitions, paroxysms of coarse tryhard sneering, gaslighting (textbook stuff, «you wear tinfoil if you do not submit») – it was as if... the facade of a human peer disappearing, revealing something alien, and much simpler in its drives.

But I guess he felt the same way, which is why he wrote it like this and blocked me.

It's a typical pattern when talking topics that concern their interests, sometimes not even related to their identity (encountered it in fairly nerdy apolitical domains) with strongly identifying Jews – making ones who lack (or suppress) such impulses all the more precious to me – and it's much of «my problem with Jews», and also exactly what I had in mind when making my case, the very mechanism by which opponents and passerbys are scared into false consciousness, into ignoring the elephant in the room, while the radicalism of the in-group grows. Nice to get confirmations quickly.

But would such sentiment, at scale, no doubt going beyond the election of Ben Gvir in a few years (and thanks to his policies), be enough to discredit Israel as a «Western-style democracy»?

but the Pelosi party core

Well you know Pelosi's stance on Israel: 'Even if the capitol crumbles to the ground, the one thing that will remain is aid to Israel!'

https://youtube.com/watch?v=nBslpxCg6CM

I got blocked by JarJarJedi too and returned the favor. I don't think he even commented to me. Surely this is not how the website is supposed to function.

Also, what a pity that Meruem managed to survive. What is the point of luring him out to a desolate location only to use just one bomb? Keep them coming! That smug prick was so arrogant, so certain that he was better than we are despite being only a few weeks old. It'd be a very different story if the Nen users were truly upstaged by technological power though...

blocking doesn't stop you from seeing their comments or replying to subthreads (idk if it blocks replying to comments), unlike on reddit

I actually really like this mechanic, because it puts the power back on the blocked party's side, only saving the blocker his nerves. Reddit logic was obnoxious.

Agree, although I'd prefer no blocking at all, or 'blocked party can reply to your comments but you don't see them'.

'blocked party can reply to your comments but you don't see them'.

IMO, that's worse than no blocking or what we have here, it'd give the blockeds too much power. The fact that I can see JJJ's posts and comment on them if I'm so inclined already creates the temptation for bad-natured humor – and if I could do that in direct replies, unseen, that's just ugly. On reddit that'd instantly create circlejerks.

When he blocked me, I couldn't reply to him even though I could see his comments. After I blocked him, I don't see his comments.

Question- if Israel hadn't decided to provide state subsidies to the Haredim, would they be more productive?

In the US, which similarly has extremely loose homeschooling laws and a permissive attitude towards religious wackos, the religious wackos are generally productive citizens because they'll starve otherwise. Even isolated cults like the Hutterites and FLDS generally support themselves.

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